Each year, about 150 faculty from all disciplines and from universities throughout France are appointed for five years to the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), whose mission is to promote the development of high-level research in universities and to strengthen interdisciplinarity.
Charis Quay has been maître de conferences at the Université Paris-Saclay, and a member of the Nanostructures at the Nanosecond timescale (NS2) group at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (LPS), since 2010. Her interests lie at the intersection of spin(-orbit) physics and mesoscopic superconductivity, and she has worked on multifarious hybrid nanostructures ranging from cleaved-edge-overgrowth GaAs quasi-1D hole wires, metal spin valves and tunnel junctions, to carbon nanotube- and transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD)-based devices. In 2017, she was awarded a CNRS Bronze Medal for her work on non-equilibrium quasiparticle spins in mesoscopic superconductors: demonstration of spin-charge separation and spin resonance, and evidence for spin-dependent heat transport [1-2]. More recently, she has begun to study superconductors with strong spin-orbit coupling, with the goal of manipulating the spin degree of freedom of the superconducting condensate [3].
Charis Quay’s appointment as a Junior Member of the IUF in 2021, which comes with a significantly reduced teaching load, will afford her the time and silence necessary to further develop her promising research activities, and to introduce new topics in the physics and introductory humanities courses she teaches.
References
[1] C. H. L. Quay, D. Chevallier, C. Bena, M. Aprili. Nature Physics, 2013, 9, 84-88
[2] M. Kuzmanović, B. Y. Wu, M. Weideneder, C. H. L. Quay, M. Aprili. Nat. Commun., 2020, 11, 4336
[3] M. Kuzmanović et al. 2021, arXiv:2104.00328
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Charis Quay
